Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday addressed a report by The Atlantic that claimed he had shared sensitive details about U.S. military strikes in Yemen on an encrypted messaging app to a group chat with other cabinet members where a reporter was accidentally added.
“Nobody was texting war plans and that’s all I have to say about that,” Hegseth said to a journalist after his plane touched down in Hawaii on an official trip.
The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg reported Monday that he was added to the group chat on March 13, two days after National Security Adviser Mike Waltz requested to add him as a contact on the Signal app.
The group chat was for the purpose of coordinating between the heads of different government agencies in regards to President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Houthi rebels in Yemen who had been targeting U.S. ships in the Red Sea since October 7, 2023.
Goldberg claimed that the morning of the strikes, on March 15, Hegseth had “texted [him] the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.”
Goldberg wrote that Hegseth had posted in the group chat “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”
He did not quote Hegseth but claimed that if the information Hegseth shared “had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility.”
Hegseth also said regarding Goldberg: “You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited, so called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again, to include the, I don’t know, the hoaxes of Russia, Russia, Russia, or the fine people on both sides, hoax, or suckers and losers hoax.”
“This is the guy that pedals in garbage. This is what he does,” Hegseth added.
He also commended the troops who conducted the raids, and the president for ordering strikes against them.
“I would love to comment on the Houthi campaign, because of the skill and courage of our troops. I’ve monitored it very closely from the beginning … Our troops, our sailors, were getting shot at as targets. Our ships couldn’t sail through, and when they did, shoot back purely defensively, or at shacks in Yemen, President Trump said, ‘No more. We will re establish deterrence, we will open freedom of navigation, and we will ultimately decimate the Houthis,’ which is exactly what we’re doing.”
Goldberg infamously wrote a story claiming that Trump had called American troops who died in World War II “suckers and losers.”
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